Grace put her on her feet; but she fell again.

The lower limbs seemed all but paralysed.
Slowly that sweet saint lifted her, and laid her on her own back; and slowly she bore her homeward, with aching knees and bleeding feet; while before her eyes hung the picture of Him who bore his cross up Calvary, till a solemn joy and pride in that sacred burden seemed to intertwine itself with her deep misery.

And fainting every moment with pain and weakness, she still went on, as if by supernatural strength: and murmured-- "Thou didst bear more for me, and shall not I bear even this for Thee ?" Surely, if blest spirits can weep and smile over the woes and heroisms of us mortal men, faces brighter than the stars looked down on that fair girl that night, and in loving sympathy called her, too, blest.
At last it was over.

Undiscovered she reached home, laid her mother on the bed, and tended her till morning; but long ere morning dawned stupor had changed into delirium, and Grace's ears were all on fire with words -- which those who have ever heard will have no heart to write.
And now, by one of those strange vagaries, in which epidemics so often indulge, appeared other symptoms; and by day-dawn cholera itself.
Heale, though recovering, was still too weak to be of use: but, happily, the medical man sent down by the Board of Health was still in the town.
Grace sent for him; but he shook his head after the first look.

The wretched woman's ravings at once explained the case, and made it, in his eyes, all but hopeless.
The sudden shock to body and mind, the sudden prostration of strength, had brought out the disease which she had dreaded so intensely, and against which she had taken so many precautions, and which yet lay, all the while, lurking unfelt in her system.
A hideous eight-and-forty hours followed.